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101 " Dozens of lives, centuries of my life, from the first stirring of consciousness in my father’s arms to the day I die, this, Harry, this is my purpose. "
― Claire North , The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
102 " You argue complexity as an excuse for inaction? "
103 " The world is ending,” she said. “The message has come down from child to adult, child to adult, passed back down the generations from a thousand years forward in time. The world is ending and we cannot prevent it. So now it’s up to you. "
104 " Is there innocence in ignorance? And if there is, do we tolerate others for their innocence’s sake? "
105 " Born some time in the mid-1920s, at her oldest she had lived to see planes fly into the World Trade Center. “I remember thinking,” she would say, “how frustrating it was that I wouldn’t live long enough to see what happened next.” But she interrogated the kalachakra of the Club, the younger members, those born in the 1980s and 1990s, who shook their heads sadly and said, “You’re not missing anything. "
106 " I had never seen the twenty-first century before. I wasn’t particularly impressed by the medicine, even less so by the politics, "
107 " The mind struggles to re-create the joy of a first kiss, but somehow manages to recall the terror of pain, the flush of humiliation and the burden of guilt with a startling clarity. "
108 " What is the point of me? Either to change a world–many, many worlds, each touched by the choices I make in my life, for every deed a consequence, and in every love and every sorrow truth–or nothing at all. A stranger takes the train to Leningrad. "
109 " They say that the mind cannot remember pain; I say it barely matters, for even if the physical sensation is lost, our recollection of the terror that surrounds it is perfect "
110 " I know I have the capacity within me to be all of that again, to feel all of that again, and know that, while the door may currently be locked, there is a black pit in the bottom of my soul that has no limit to its falling. They say that the mind cannot remember pain; I say it barely matters, for even if the physical sensation is lost, our recollection of the terror that surrounds it is perfect. I do not want to die at this present moment, though the circumstances of this present writing will dictate my course. I remember that I have wanted it, and it was real. There "
111 " I had spent an entire life praying for a miracle, and none had come. And now I looked at the stuffy chapel of my ancestors and saw vanity and greed, heard the call to prayer and thought of power, smelled incense and wondered at the waste of it all. "
112 " that for tyranny to flourish all it required was the complicity of good men. "